Lore and Legends

Mysteries of the Wood River Valley

by Van Gordon Sauter ILLUSTRATIONS Michael Wertz

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MOSS MAN OF FRENCHMAN'S BEND

Even by the mid-1980s, the young and restless of the Wood River Valley had a subset that sustained itself by lackadaisical work and a host of chemical concoctions. And, thus, the story of the Moss Man begins.

In March of 1984, cross-country skiers reported to the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office that a man—with peeling skin and green moss on his back—was living in the wide, shallow, natural mineral hot pool at Frenchman’s Bend in the Smoky Mountains, about ten miles west of Ketchum on Warm Springs Road. On the ground nearby were the man’s frozen clothes.

The deputies extracted the semi-coherent, 6’ 2’’ interloper and carted him off to the old St. Moritz Hospital, where doctors were flabbergasted. The man, then 20-year-old Hailey resident Timothy Hammerbeck, claimed to have been living in the pool for 28 days.

After initially settling in for a long, quiet, speed-heightened soak, Hammerback was horrified to discover that his clothes, lying on the ground by the hot springs, had frozen. It was bitterly cold, and putting on his icy outfit, he declared, was out of the question. Even leaving the pool for a few moments to get fresh water from Warm Springs Creek resulted in his feet beginning to freeze. So he stayed in the 90-plus-degree water, only leaving as infrequently as possible to get a drink. He figured there would soon be a spring thaw and he could get back into his clothes.

Having resigned himself to being trapped in the hot water, Hammerback held fast to his resolve and bobbed around for days that flowed into weeks. He was observed by some people who dismissed him as unhinged and moved on. A man on a snowmobile gave him a bottle of beer—his only nourishment—and, as he later recalled, “probably the best beer I ever had in my life.” The hospital doctor estimated he lost 60 pounds during his immersion.

Current Blaine County Sheriff Walt Femling, one of the officers who came to extract Hammerback, told Outside magazine for an article done more than a decade after the soggy event that the Moss Man had basically spent the winter sleeping in the post office, before taking his historic dip.